Yes, I think we need to investigate if bundles is a good thing for the world. I have an old memory from my childhood, in Romania during communism I went with my grandma to buy oil(or something like that) and if we wanted to buy that we were also forced to buy some other crap like pencils so the shop would get rid of old stock(I apologize if my memory is tricking me , maybe someone can confirm this I can't find anything on google with my search terms). So bundling feels to me dirty, I get forced into something I might not like.
Maybe the actual problem is that big companies have a lot of money that they can spend on this products and offer them for free then make it impossible to create a fair competition. Would MS get the same Windows installs if the computers would come with the choice of different OSs )from what I read in most shops in the world options with alternatives are not present)
>I have an old memory from my childhood, in Romania during communism I went with my grandma to buy oil(or something like that) and if we wanted to buy that we were also forced to buy some other crap like pencils so the shop would get rid of old stock
bundling of physical goods with bundling of digital goods isn't really comparable because the latter doesn't have any marginal cost. If you don't use it, nothing's being wasted.
>So bundling feels to me dirty, I get forced into something I might not like.
That's not really a problem with bundling per se. If I get amazon prime for free/fast shipping and it includes free prime video and twitch prime, I don't feel "forced" into using those services. What's happening in this case though, is that microsoft was apparently auto-installing teams, which is questionable but not something intrinsic with bundling.
>Maybe the actual problem is that big companies have a lot of money that they can spend on this products and offer them for free then make it impossible to create a fair competition.
Can't you make the same argument about any free service offered by a company? eg. free cloudflare making it harder for paid cdns to compete, or free git hosting by github/gitlab making ti hard for a paid service to compete?
About free GitHub, if GitHub financials would be independent and they can afford offering some free feature then I think is 100% fair, it would not be fair if GitHub would get money from Azure profits so they can offer everything for free so all competitors fail.
When I buy something and get some extra free crap-ware, is that actually free? As an example some internet companies here would offer you as a free bonus antivirus software - is that free or it is paid from our money and maybe with our data ? Is Amazon Prime free stuff free or it is paid from your pocket but in an indirect way.
The example from my memory was more about the felling I have when I think about that, is like when you buy a phone or some OS and some shit is already installed and you can't remove it,
> About free GitHub, if GitHub financials would be independent and they can afford offering some free feature then I think is 100% fair, it would not be fair if GitHub would get money from Azure profits so they can offer everything for free so all competitors fail.
So what you're saying is that if github is offering it for free, and they themselves are profitable, that's fine, but if the company is being subsidized by microsoft it's not fine? Why draw an arbitrary distinction at the corporate level? Furthermore, if microsoft teams is being developed under the team/organization as the rest of office, is that fine then?
Also, what about github gists? It's a free pastebin that has zero connection to the main site. You can post with an account or anonymously. Either way it's free, and there aren't any benefits conferred to you for having a github pro subscription. Is github being anti-competitive by offering it? Are they putting all the other pastebin websites out of business? If anything it's worse than teams because with teams you at least have to pay for the bundle to access it.
>Is Amazon Prime free stuff free or it is paid from your pocket but in an indirect way.
I'm not sure how prime video (included with amazon prime) can ever be profitable on its own. They spend millions (billions?) on original programming. How can you ever recoup that by some "indirect way"?
>The example from my memory was more about the felling I have when I think about that, is like when you buy a phone or some OS and some shit is already installed and you can't remove it,
You're probably talking about software vendors who pay OEMs to have their software pre-installed on their phones. In this case the software vendor hopes they can recoup the initial cost somehow (eg. by showing ads, collecting data, or upselling the customer to a paid subscription). This is very different than what microsoft's doing. There's no ads in teams. It's probably not spying on you (and even if it did microsoft could already do that on its own). There isn't teams premium either. In short, the incentive structure is completely different.
Maybe my solution is not good, do you have a better one or you think there is no problem here and giants can abuse their money to subsidize some stuff not because they want to be nice but because they want to win a market that can later exploit or because they want to kill possible competition. A similar problem is happening when giants buy smaller competitors and close them down.
> When I buy something and get some extra free crap-ware, is that actually free? As an example some internet companies here would offer you as a free bonus antivirus software - is that free or it is paid from our money and maybe with our data ? Is Amazon Prime free stuff free or it is paid from your pocket but in an indirect way.
The following step is logical: ban all advertisement and outreach. Because that is paid in the same way.
Is this solving unfair competition? My point was not to ban free stuff, it is to acknowledge that nothing is free and then prevent a big company to use money from market A to destroy competitors in market B - this would mean Google,Aplle,Microsoft needs to be split (this would maximize competition but it will not be popular in the short term even with the extreme free market evangelists)
While I think (note: without thinking too deeply about it, just my general impression, a pretty weakly held opinion) that splitting those up would be a net plus, I was specifically replying to the quoted part.
Maybe the actual problem is that big companies have a lot of money that they can spend on this products and offer them for free then make it impossible to create a fair competition. Would MS get the same Windows installs if the computers would come with the choice of different OSs )from what I read in most shops in the world options with alternatives are not present)